Nursing

• Your yoga-teaching brother refuses to get vaccinated for COVID-19 and is confident that fresh air is the best medicine.
• Your boss is hiring another white man for a leadership team already made up entirely of white men.
• When that argument fails to have the intended persuasive impact, people often grow frustrated, and disagreement becomes conflict.
• And one of the easiest behaviors to change is the words that you say.

A conversational toolbox, based on what works

• Based on these analyses, we developed an algorithm that picks out specific words and phrases that make people in conflict feel that their counterpart is thoughtfully engaging with their perspective.
• Those who received a brief conversational receptiveness training were seen as more desirable teammates and advisers by their counterpart.
• Training also turned out to make people more persuasive in their arguments than those who did not learn about conversational receptiveness.

Measuring benefits of the tools in practice

• We paired vaccine-supportive participants with the vaccine hesitant and instructed them to persuade their partner to get the shot.
• We found that participants who received a couple minutes of instruction in conversational receptiveness were seen as more trustworthy and more reasonable by their counterparts.
• In a subsequent study, we explained the concept of conversational receptiveness to participants on both sides of the issue.

Dialing down the acrimony

• That’s an all-too-familiar experience for parents of teenagers who seem to have advanced degrees in ignoring unwelcome advice.
• Health care providers often face a similar challenge when they try to persuade patients to change behaviors they do not wish to change.
• Our work on conversational receptiveness builds on extensive prior research on the benefits of showing engagement with opposing perspectives.

• He argued in a celebrated essay that even the prosperous, post-Second World War United States was not immune to the radicalism of authoritarian populism.
• The so-called Red Scare of the 1950s was “simply the old ultra-conservatism and the old isolationism heightened by the extraordinary pressures of the contemporary world.” Seven decades later, Hofstadter’s words ring true again.

Paranoid politics

• With so much money and power behind it, this paranoid style of politics — with its enemies lists, demonization of opposition leaders and often violent language — has gone mainstream.
• But is there anything to fear from the red-hot rhetoric of the paranoid style of politics?
• In Hofstadter’s time, after all, American conservative politics turned away from fringe radicalism following the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963.
• The following year, Lyndon Johnson defeated right-wing Republican insurgent, Barry Goldwater in one of the largest landslides in U.S. history.

1. The shrinking middle ground

• We are now in a world of zero-sum political contests, with a shrinking middle ground.
• Conservative parties often force extreme referendums to maintain their grip on a deeply divided electorate.
• Republicans are now doubling down on the abortion issue, even though they’re facing pushback from some state legislatures and governors.

2. The working class isn’t benefiting

• Nevertheless, conservative parties around the world are marketing themselves as parties of the working class.
• Populists recognize the working class is essential to their success at the national level because of the “diploma divide” that now separates right and left.
• It used to be that working people recognized education as a path to prosperity.

3. The rich and powerful direct the chaos

• In a war of all against all, it’s not the wealthy who lose.
• Furthermore, once a lust for vengeance takes hold in the general public, it’s almost always being directed by elites with money and power who benefit financially or politically from the chaos.

4. Assaults on the rule of law

• The paranoid style of politics has entered a new phase with a full-spectrum assault on the rule of law — from inside government.
• Populists are lying when they argue they want to empower the rest of us by divesting judges of their authority to oversee democracy.
• As he runs again for president, he’s already telegraphing his violent desires, promising pardons for the Jan. 6 insurrectionists.

The road ahead for populists

• The defeats of Trump and Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro don’t represent absolute rejections of their movements.
• Despite an indictment for alleged financial crime and being found liable for sexual abuse in a civil case, Trump is still the 2024 front-runner.
• Read more:
  Why populism has an enduring and ominous appeal

  We can’t count on an easy institutional fix, like a grand electoral coalition to push the populists off the ballot.

Red lights flashing

• Nor can we count on the right to step back from the abyss of culture wars.
• We can’t even say for certain that the populism will recede in the usual cyclical manner.
• All citizens can do is offer is constant, concerted pushback against the many big lies told by populists.

• That required, by 2018, lifting the employment rate for First Nations Australians from 48% to 60%, with the rate for other Australians being 72%.
• At the 2021 census the employment rate for First Nations Australians was 51%, while the rate for other Australians was 74%.
• Assuming the employment rate for other Australians does not change, the rate of incremental gains in First Nations employment since 2008 suggests that closing the employment gap is going to take 100 years.

What these statistics show

• The Closing the Gap methodology measures employment as a percentage of all people aged 15 to 64.
• We’ve adopted the approach used by the Australian Bureau of Statistics for its unemployment data.
• We’re using Australian Bureau of Statistics data, so we’ve stuck with the bureau’s approach.

Educational attainment matters

• Almost half of the First Nations Australians (49%) do not have a qualification beyond secondary education, compared with 31% of other Australians.
• These differences in educational attainment are reflected in employment outcomes.
• For every level of educational attainment less than a diploma, First Nations unemployment rate is at least double that of other Australians.

Location counts

• But one clear factor is geographic location.
• Why do the unemployment rates for other Australians show the opposite trend, with lower rates the more remote?
• Read more:
  Albanese government announces $424 million to narrow a gap that is not closing fast enough

Employment by occupation

The unemployment-related factors lead to differences in the occupational profile of First Nations Australians. They are more likely than other Australians to be employed in community and personal services or manual labour, and significantly less likely to be in a professional or managerial role.

Different approaches needed

• These statistics show that, with the exception of those achieving postgraduate qualifications, First Nations Australians face multiple disadvantages in employment.
• Listening to those closest to the problem, and giving First Nations Australians a greater say in designing and implementing solutions would be a good start.

• Australians’ access to a range of contraceptive options depends on where they live and how wealthy they are.
• A recent parliamentary inquiry recommends ways to end this “postcode lottery” for people who want to use long-acting reversible contraception.
• There are several types of long-acting reversible contraception: the hormonal contraceptive implant, the hormonal intrauterine devices (IUD) and copper IUDs.

How do they work?

• It releases a progestogen hormone which prevents monthly egg release from the ovary for up to three years.
• IUDs are small T-shaped devices which are inserted into the uterus.
• Hormonal IUDs contain a progestogen hormone and mainly work by thickening the cervical mucus and preventing sperm from swimming up into the uterus.

They have additional benefits for some users

• As well as better protection from pregnancy, some long-acting reversible contraception methods have other benefits.
• The hormonal IUD, Mirena, for example, reduces heavy menstrual bleeding.
• This includes people with hormone-driven cancers such as breast cancer, for whom any hormonal contraceptive would be considered unsafe.

Why aren’t they more available?

• Out-of-pocket IUD insertion-related costs can also vary from zero to hundreds of dollars if people don’t have access to publicly funded services.
• Here’s what to expect

  On the supply side, too few health professionals provide these essential services.

• There are multiple successful models of nurse-led long-acting reversible contraception services and postpartum insertion of implants by midwifes nationally and internationally.
• However, most nurses aren’t able to access Medicare remuneration, which creates additional barriers for this highly skilled workforce to provide these services.

What are the recommendations for reform?

• The Senate inquiry has recognised these barriers and recommends making contraception universally affordable, and specifically, subsidising copper IUDs.
• It also recommends adequate remuneration through Medicare for GPs, nurses and midwives to provide long-acting reversible contraception insertion and removal, and collaborative efforts between the government and medical colleges to improve access to workforce training.
• While the recommendations are welcome, they now need to be turned into actions through adequate funding.